What is the American Dream?

For some people, it may be a comfortable house with a white picket fence, a couple kids, a pet dog, and a barbecue with friends in the back yard on a warm summer evening. For others, fulfillment of the dream could mean creating a successful business and making a million dollars.

And for many people throughout our history, especially those who have lived under drastically different forms of government, the American Dream has simply been the ability to live in a country where they are free to talk about whatever they wish without being afraid that government thugs are going to burst through the door at any moment and haul them away to a concentration camp or threaten their family.

In its highest expression, the American Dream is an ideal of the Human Spirit. It is an ideal wherein each and every individual human being is offered the opportunity to reach his or her greatest potential. And its basis is embodied in what has become the most famous line of the founding document of the United States of America in the words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Thomas Jefferson
Declaration of Independence

So, is the United States of America an “ideal” country? Has the “American Dream” been fulfilled? The answer is obvious: People are imperfect and the ideals that America claims as its foundation are far from being completely fulfilled. Our society has serious problems. Many of the freedoms that we would like to take for granted are too often overrun by an excessively authoritarian and insensitive government; all kinds of bigotry still exist in many corners of our society; and there are vast inequities in power between huge corporations, a government that is supposed to be “of the people,” and the average citizen.

Does this mean that the ideal does not exist? … that the vision is not real? … or that it is not important?      … No, it does not.

By their nature, ideals exist independent of physical reality. And ideals are important even if they are not completely fulfilled. In fact, they are especially important when they seem to be far above the norm of society. They give us something to aspire toward. They serve as a model of what we should become even if we are in the midst of struggles on an entirely different level.

And, in the long run, ideals can be fulfilled. With the right effort, bit by bit, they can be fulfilled in society at large, even though the road toward them may seem long and arduous. But above all, the thing that is most important for each of us to realize is that each of us individually, through our own efforts, can become, in our own way, a fulfillment of the ideals of freedom, courage, love, and personal achievement in our own lives.

Unlimited Potential

The Universe has a set of Laws which govern the Natural Order and place certain limitations on what we can do. We have always known that. But in modern times, the results of our mastery of those Natural Laws have shown us that, in many ways, we are limited more by our own concepts and desires than we are by the laws of physics.

What is the potential of the Human Spirit? We have sent fellow human beings to the moon. We have explored in a very up-close way millions of miles beyond that. We have peered deeply into that which we will never be able to explore with our personal senses. And we have shaped vast areas of our own planet. What in this Universe can we can accomplish? And, perhaps even more importantly, what should we be trying to do with our abilities?

For example, it has been said that we have no business exploring space until we solve all of our problems back home first. And the same argument has been made as well for costly and complex endeavors on Earth, both by the public sector and by private companies and individuals. But is this really the right attitude? Why not accept and even promote the idea that the great accomplishments of some of us can serve as inspirations to the rest of us?

Let’s take a look at ourselves: Where we have come from and where we are now, and also where we may be capable of going, doing, and becoming in the future, both with physical exploration and in building our society and ourselves to our fullest potential.

Economics and Real Life

Economics is not just a modern and artificial creation of bankers, politicians and professional economists. And, despite government and corporate shenanigans in their practice, the fundamental rules of economics weren’t invented in smoke-filled back rooms for the purpose of confusing and confounding the rest of us.

The basic principles of economics are actually among the most universal and natural laws in the world. Everything in Life counts the cost of its endeavors, from the giant corporation embarking on a new enterprise, to a rabbit expending her energy burrowing a hole in the ground, to a fox deciding whether the rabbit is close enough to attempt a high-speed chase for a quick meal.

The biggest failing of many people who promote various notions of “utopia” is often not the sincerity of their idealism, but their misunderstanding of the complexity of human nature and, well, Nature in general.

But are we limited to the cold, “Darwinian” realm of “hunt and be hunted” that we see in the “natural world” of the fox and the rabbit? No, of course we are not. Our potential to observe and understand, and to empathize with our fellow human beings and even the natural world around us, allows us to build a technology and a society that is vastly more complex than that of our cousins in the animal kingdom. But that also means that our contemplation of ideals cannot be limited to the simplistic notions that such systems as Marxism or Objectivism bring to us.

Here, we will explore how things work in the real world. We will look at what is wrong with many “utopian” ideals. And we will discuss and perhaps even debate about the best way forward from here.

International Influence and the Global Culture

The globalization of human culture is a fact of life in the modern world. So, if the ideals which we claim as the basis for our nation are founded upon individual liberties, what does that mean in an increasingly global culture? It means several things.

It means first and foremost that, if we are not to be hypocrites, and if we actually mean to recognize as a “self-evident” principle “that all men are created equal, [and] that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” we must recognize those rights as being universal. In past centuries and in previous cultures, it has been easy to see those outside of our tribe / village / principality / kingdom as “the others” and as somehow less worthy than ourselves (whoever and wherever “our selves” happened to be.) But in America, we have built a model over the past two centuries of the bringing together of people and cultures from all over the world. We should have the greatest ability to promote the concept of a Universal Brotherhood among mankind (and it could be said that we, of all countries, have the greatest responsibility to do so.)

In a global society and a global economy, every culture has an effect on others. And, certainly, every country has a right, and even a responsibility, to protect itself and its interests. So, as the world’s largest single economy and as by far the world’s largest military power, in what way should we proceed as we project our influence, economic, cultural or otherwise, across the world?

Into the Future: The Way Forward from Here

Only a few years ago the United States fell into what has been consistently described as “the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression.” The effect of this disaster continues to linger, and, at best, we are still struggling through a long and difficult recovery. This crisis, combined with the Middle East wars, has caused many people to question not only the greatness of America but the fundamental value of the Western world’s capitalistic system in general. But is “capitalism” really at fault? And are America’s values really flawed?

In these pages, we will delve past the shallow political name-calling and explore how things actually work. We will examine the real fundamentals of our ideals and not just the buzz words and talking points of “the left” or “the right.” And we will look for real solutions to the real issues.

But even more importantly than that, we will look at the nature, the spirit, and the potential of the individual and see how each individual person may have his or her own success in Life regardless of what turmoil going on in the world of politics and economics in general.